If we flee from the evil in ourselves, we do it at our hazard. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.

Everything with substance casts a shadow. The ego stands to the shadow as light to shade. This is the quality that makes us human.

For the early Greeks, the daimon was both evil and creative; it was the source of destruction as well as spiritual guidance, much like those primitive demons described by Freud. The word daimon was sometimes used by Plato as a synonym for theos or god; and mighty Eros was also a daimon. Daimons were potentially both good and evil, constructive and

Jung believed that God, the living God, could be found only where we least want to look, the place we have the most resistance to exploring. This living God is entwined with our own darkness and shadow, woven in our wounds and complexes, laced with pathologies. On the other hand, the God of Belief, the God removed from creation and from everyday li

Following the lead of his long-time teacher and friend, theologian Paul Tillich, May introduced the daimonic as a concept designed to rival the “devil,” the traditional Judeo-Christian symbol of cosmic evil. It is May’s contention that the term, the devil, “is unsatisfactory because it projects the power outside the self and opens the way for all k

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. JESUS

Good loses some of its goodness, and evil some of its evil. As doubt of the “light” of consciousness increases, so the “darkness” of the soul appears less black. A new symbol emerges in which the opposites can be reconciled. I am thinking here of the symbols of the Cross, of the T’ai-Chi-Tu, and of the Golden Flower. For the individual, the emergen

Prolific Jungian analyst James Hillman says: “The unconscious cannot be conscious; the moon has its dark side, the sun goes down and cannot shine everywhere at once, and even God has two hands. Attention and focus require some things to be out of the field of vision, to remain in the dark. One cannot look both ways.” For this reason, we see the sha

There are three ways in which the individual can attempt to solve the problem. He can renounce one side in favor of the other; he can retire from the conflict altogether; or he can seek a solution that will satisfy both sides. The first two possibilities need no further discussion. The third seems at first impossible. How can contradictory opposite